The life of Adolf Tolkachev, Soviet dissident and CIA spy.

After a non-profit’s documentary about a central African despot became the most viral video of all time, the founder had a nude nervous breakdown on the streets of San Diego. Now he’s back.

Years after the era of the “superpredator,” Taurus Buchanan is still paying for a crime of his youth.

A young, pregnant woman named Laci Peterson disappears, her husband begins to act strangely, and one of the largest media circuses in history descends on the sleepy community of Modesto, CA.

On the unlikely friendship between Nelson Algren and the young writer during the final years of Algren’s life.

It was June of 1980 when Nelson called me breathlessly from the highway.

The 20-year-old is poised to burst into the top tier of women’s tennis. Can she also burst Japan’s expectations of what it means to be Japanese?

On the history of the Bund, an armed, socialist anti-Zionist group that was once the most popular Jewish party in Poland until they were murdered in the Holocaust.

Rodrigo Rosenberg, a highly respected corporate attorney in Guatemala, began, in the spring of 2009, to prophesy his own murder. The unraveling of a political conspiracy.

The world’s largest jewelry retailer was a cesspool of harassment and unfair treatment of women who worked there.

An interesting side effect of reading the report is to feel that anyone who claims to have understood its arguments, purposes, and consequences within twenty-four or forty-eight hours of encountering it is likely untrustworthy.

A circle of young black playwrights is doing some of the most vital work in American theater. And Perry is at its center.

Welcome to Coffeyville, Kansas, where the judge has no law degree, debt collectors get a cut of the bail, and Americans are watching their lives — and liberty — disappear in the pursuit of medical debt collection.

On the shared life of Tatiana and Krista Hogan:

The girls’ doctors believe it is entirely possible that the sensory input that one girl receives could somehow cross that bridge into the brain of the other. One girl drinks, another girl feels it.

Nicola Gobbo defended Melbourne’s most notorious criminals at the height of a 
gangland war. They didn’t know she had a secret.

How is it that literature has produced a wealth of information about the sex lives of straight white men and yet so little about the abortions they have or have not paid for?

The motley gang of L.A. teens that cat-burgled celebrities, sometimes repeatedly, in search of designer clothes, jewelry, and something to do. The story that became The Bling Ring.

Obinwanne Okeke was supposed to be a rags-to-riches Nigerian success story, was even featured on the cover of Forbes. Then the feds followed the money.

Mexico City has one of the most ambitious and sophisticated video surveillance systems in the world. But it hasn’t stopped crime.

“Now Pynchon hides in plain sight, on the Upper West Side, with a family and a history of contradictions: a child of the postwar Establishment determined to reject it; a postmodernist master who’s called himself a ‘classicist’; a workaholic stoner; a polymath who revels in dirty puns; a literary outsider who’s married to a literary agent; a scourge of capitalism who sent his son to private school and lives in a $1.7 million prewar classic six.”

There are believed to be 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. We’re not always who you think we are. Some pick your strawberries or care for your children. Some are in high school or college. And some, it turns out, write news articles you might read. I grew up here. This is my home. Yet even though I think of myself as an American and consider America my country, my country doesn’t think of me as one of its own.

On the history and study of pica:

Indeed, we have long defined ourselves and others by what we do and do not eat, from kashrut dietary restrictions described in Leviticus to the naming of Comanche bands (Kotsoteka—buffalo eaters, Penateka—honey eaters, Tekapwai—no meat) to insults—French frogs, English limeys, German krauts. But poya seemed to beg a different question: what was one to make of people who ate food that wasn’t food at all?

“My Vassar College Faculty ID affords me free smoothies, free printing paper, paid leave, and access to one of the most beautiful libraries on Earth. It guarantees that I have really good health care and more disposable income than anyone in my Mississippi family. But way more than I want to admit, I’m wondering what price we pay for these kinds of ID’s, and what that price has to do with the extrajudicial disciplining and killing of young black human beings.”

“She has no theories, for example, to explain why she, of all people, felt unburdened by the unspoken rules marking certain subjects off limits for children, or why, for that matter, she has that particular gift, that ability to recall the emotional experiences of adolescence, the confusion, the longing, the rivalries — the memories, in other words, that most of us try to bury as quickly and deeply as we can.”

In the latest revelation from Edward Snowden, the U.S. government is shown to collect and retain massive amounts of data on nearly 900,000 people with the most minimal of connections to official NSA targets. The collected information tells our “stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes.”